I've been researching my family history for 8 years now and it's about time I shared some of my findings.
My father's family come mostly from the North East of England (surnames Hudson, Lamb, Kerss, Pattison, Todner). Mum's father's family come from Birmingham, England (Darby, Pugh, Read) and Mum's mother's from mid-Wales (Pugh, Hughes, Jones).

Saturday, 22 January 2011

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Do Some Random Research

Randy Seaver has set a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge: go to the Random Number Generator, take the name generated and plug it into Ancestry.com, then research the first hit and see what you can find about him/her. Randy credits Chris Staat with the original idea.

The name I got was "Moses Lynn".

The first hit was for the 1930 census living in Columbus, Muscogee, Georgia. Moses was born in 1910 in Georgia. He was living with his mother Grace, sister Dovie (27) and brothers Lee (23), GW (17) and Ron (13). Moses was 20, single, and working as a drayman. Grace was 48 and born in Alabama.

Narrowing the search to include a year of birth of 1910 brought up a quick hit in the 1920 census. The family, still without a father, were in Columbus. GW's name turns out to be Green. Mother Grace and sister Dovie were working as spoolers in a cotton mill.

Moses' 1910 census entry didn't pop up in the initial search so I searched for his mother and found her, with husband and with the oldest children including 7 month old Moses, in Nances, Muscogee, Georgia. Moses' father was Lee Lynn, aged 40 in 1910 and was also recorded as a "dray" or "dairy" man.

I've tried to find Lee on the 1900 census or 1880 but can't see him. I tried looking for an Alabama or Georgia marriage for Lee and Grace and couldn't see that either, and I'm not sure where to go from here. I'm in the UK, as are all my ancestors (apart from a quick swing through Chicago), so I've had little opportunity to do any research in the US. I may just have another look at this sometime when it's not quite so late on a Saturday night.